Get it. These are “tracts”… I’ll be here all day. These are from a blog dedicated to such ethereal ephemera called Old Time Religion. They remind me that I should finally start my “bad Christian books” blog – I’ve got about thirty books on my shelf that I haven’t blogged yet, and I still haven’t finished reviewing Help Lord the Devil Made me Fat.
You know how there are five Greek words for love? This is a good thing. Because it allows for clarity when you’re using a language of love.
We’ve got one word in English, and it’s contextually defined. I love God. But I don’t love God like I love my wife. And I don’t love my wife like I love my lunch. This is part of the reason that Christian music is so culturally odd.
Am I the only one who gets uncomfortable when we use the analogy of a human relationship when talking about meeting God. I know the Bible does it. But it just sounds odd when people tell the media they hope this new Jesus advertising campaign is like the preliminary to a first date with Jesus.
But Dominic Steele, director of Christians in the Media, hopes it will have real resonance.
”They’re a first invitation to a conversation about having a date with God or potentially starting a relationship.”
I understand the rationale – it just makes me cringe a little. You don’t “date” your father – unless you’re Mark Driscoll’s kids. My response to this language is the same as my response to “daddy date”. Maybe this is a case of unhelpful definition creep when it comes to the word date. It seems to come with a whole lot of eros baggage when it may instead be either storge, agape or philia type love.
No, this isn’t a post about Jeopardy. Have you ever seen a billboard that just didn’t make sense? Have you ever seen one of those billboards that came from a Christian organisation? Well, here’s one. So now you can answer “yes” to both those questions… It makes no sense to me at all – perhaps you can explain it to me.
Answers in Genesis even made this into a video advert on YouTube. I think they’re suggesting that if you’re not a Christian you’re likely to shoot people because you don’t really care about them – or that people who don’t believe in God are more likely to shoot you because they don’t care about you.
It’s just odd and pretty screwy. Though I’d expect that from these guys. They’re Christianity’s Richard Dawkins.